Bloodhounds

Chapter Four

In the crypt, the Bloodhounds were in full cry.

"The puzzle is the thing," Milo Motion bayed. "The challenge of the puzzle. Without that, there's nothing."

"You said it!" Jessica rounded on him. "There's nothing in those books except the puzzle, and if the puzzle's no good you feel cheated at the end. Most of those so-called classic detective stories are flawed. Agatha Christie went to preposterous lengths to mystify her readers and she's reckoned to be the best of them. Take the plot of The Mousetrap."

"Better not," Polly Wycherley gently cautioned her. "Just in case any of us hasn't seen the play."

Jessica jerked her head toward Polly in annoyance, and the flounce of the blond curls drew an envious sigh from Shirley-Ann. "Have a heart, Polly," Jessica said. "How can we have a serious discussion if we aren't allowed to analyze the plots?"

The reason why Polly was everyone's choice as chairman was made clear. She explained evenly, but with a distinct note of authority, "Jessica, dear, we all love discussing crime stories, or we wouldn't be here, but another reason for coming is to get recommendations from each other of marvelous books we haven't read. Don't let's rob any book of its mystery."

"I deliberately mentioned The Mousetrap because it isn't a book," Jessica pointed out.

"Yes, and we appreciate your restraint, but just in case some of us haven't seen the play…"

"Is that a ruling from the chair?"

"No, we don't go in for rules," Polly said serenely. "If you want to criticize the puzzle story in general terms, my dear, I'm positive that you can do it, and still make the points you wish to."

"All right," offered Jessica. "What I'm saying without mentioning any titles-"

"Thank you, dear," murmured Polly.

"is that in order to mystify people, really fox them, I mean, writers were forced into concocting story lines that were just plain silly, like one very well-known whodunit in which the person who tells the story is revealed as the killer in the last chapter."

"The last chapter but two, if my memory serves me right," put in Shirley-Ann.

Jessica widened her eyes. "I can see we're going to have to watch what we say in future."

Shirley-Ann felt herself reddening and was relieved when Jessica softened the remark with a smile.

Milo was not smiling. "What's wrong with the narrator doing it?"

"Because that's a trick," said Jessica. "A piece of literary sleight-of-hand. She had to go to absurd lengths to make it work. I mean, the writer did. This is so difficult, Polly."

"It didn't trouble me," said Milo. "And it didn't trouble millions of other people, judged by the success of the book you're talking about. It's still in print after seventy years."

"Is that how long ago it was written?" said Polly, dangerously close to offending the principle she had recommended a second or two before. But it seemed she was only steering the discussion in a less adversarial direction. Her piloting couldn't be faulted.

Miss Chilmark, the dragon empress, who had been silent up to now, waded in. "There's really no reason why a puzzle story shouldn't have other merits. I can think of a work with a wonderful, intricate puzzle that is intellectually pleasing as well as theologically instructive. A novel of character, with a respect for history…"

"Any guesses? I never got past page forty-two," murmured Jessica, unheard by Miss Chilmark, who continued to rhapsodize on the merits of The Name of the Rose until she was interrupted by the barking of a dog.

"This will be Rupert," Jessica informed Shirley-Ann.

"With a dog?"

"The dog isn't the problem," said Milo.

As it turned out, Milo was mistaken. The dog was a problem. Everyone looked toward the door, and a large brown mongrel, perhaps a cross between a setter and a German shepherd, stepped in and sniffed the air. It had a thick, wavy coat gleaming from the drenching it had got, and it trotted directly to the center of the circle and shook itself vigorously. Everyone was spattered. There were shrieks of outrage, and the meeting broke up in disorder. A chair was overturned, and Polly's handbag tipped upside down. The dog, excited by the commotion, rolled on its back, got up, and barked some more.

Miss Chilmark cried, "Somebody take it outside. My dress is ruined."

The owner appeared, a tall, thin, staring man in a black leather jacket, dark blue corduroys and a black beret, and rapped out a command.

"Marlowe, heel!"

The dog wagged its tail, gave another shimmy, and distributed more moisture.

"It takes no notice of you whatsoever," Miss Chilmark complained. "You ought to have it on a leash. Or, better still, leave it at home."

"That's a flint-hearted attitude, if I may say so, madam," Rupert replied in an accent redolent of one of the better public schools. "Coming here is the high point of Marlowe's week. He's merely doing what dogs do to dry themselves."

Milo said, "And what about all the other things dogs do? Are we going to be treated to those? I can't bear the suspense."

"What have you got against dumb animals?" said Rupert. "How would you like to sit here in a sopping wet coat?"

"How would you like it if I sent you the dry-cleaning bill?" Miss Chilmark riposted.

"Call yourselves Bloodhounds, and you panic when a real dog turns up," Rupert said, with a grin that displayed more gaps than teeth.

Polly Wycherley judged this as the proper moment to restore order. "Why don't we all go back to our seats? Then Marlowe ought to settle down. He's usually no trouble."

"The chairs are wet," Miss Chilmark objected. "I refuse to sit on a wet chair."

A cloth was produced, the seats were wiped, and the meeting resumed with Marlowe in disgrace, anchored by a lead to his master's chair leg, and forced to lie outside the circle.

Shirley-Ann was intrigued that Rupert could appear so indifferent to the chaos he and his dog had just inflicted. He sat between Polly and Milo in a relaxed attitude with legs crossed and his left hand cupping his chin. It was a face without much flesh, dominated by a beak of a nose and dark, deepset, alert eyes overlapped by the front edge of the black beret.

Polly said, "We were having quite a fruitful discussion about the predominance of the puzzle in the classic detective novel."

"Tiresome, isn't it?" Rupert took up the challenge at once. "Totally unconnected with the real world. All those eccentric detectives-snobbish lords and little old ladies and Belgian refugees looking for unconsidered clues. Absolute codswallop. In the whole history of crime in this country, real crime, I defy you to name one murder that was solved by a private detective. You can't." His owlish eyes scanned the circle. "You can't."

"That doesn't put me off," Milo gamely answered. "I don't want my reading too close to real life."

"Or real death," said Jessica.

"Exactly." But Milo had missed the point.

Rupert laughed and displayed even more gum. He was quite a ruin, but extremely watchable. "Fairy stories for grownups."

"Why not?" said Milo. "I like a little magic, even if it turns out to have been a trick."

Shirley-Ann chimed in, "That goes for me, too."

Rupert gave her a pained look. "Another one suffering from arrested development. Hell's teeth, I'm seriously outnumbered now."

Polly sounded a lighter note. "When some of us heard P. D. James at the Pump Room a few years ago, she said she must have had the mind of a crime writer even as a child, because when she first heard the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty, her thought was 'Did he fall, or was he pushed?'"

Even Rupert smiled, and then went straight on to the offensive again. "And they all live happily ever after?" he pressed them. "Is that what you want from your reading?"

"A sense of order restored, anyway," said Shirley-Ann. "Is that the same thing?"

Milo remarked, "I like the loose ends tidied up."

"So that you can sleep easy, knowing that all's right with the world," Rupert summed up with heavy irony. "Do you people ever read the crime statistics? Do you know what the clearup rate is? Has any of you ever had your house burgled?"

"Yes."

Heads turned abruptly, for it was Sid who had spoken. He was so inconspicuous that even a single word was quite a bombshell. Having let it fall, he lowered his eyes again, as if the flat cap resting on his knees had become more interesting than anything else in the room.

Shirley-Ann was intrigued to know what Sid was doing in a discussion group like this if he was so reluctant to join in. He plainly didn't wish to say any more. He avoided eye contact. His posture, his whole behavior, seemed to ask the others to ignore him, and that was what she herself had done up to now. She prided herself on being observant, so Sid obviously had a special talent for self-effacement. Not to be defeated, she regarded him minutely. Probably in his early forties, she guessed, with a more powerful physique than his bowed shoulders suggested. Slightly hooded blue-gray eyes, of which she had seen only glimpses, so her power of observation was not so faulty after all. Small, even teeth. Nothing in his looks could justify such shyness. Perhaps he felt out of his element socially. The clothes didn't give obvious clues, except that they were what you expected a man twenty years older to wear. A white shirt and black tie under the raincoat. Was he an undertaker, perhaps? Not a policeman, for heaven's sake? Dark blue trousers, probably part of a suit. Black, well-polished laced-up shoes. The workingman's raincoat that he wouldn't be shedding, however warm the surroundings. And the flat cap on his knees. You poor, pathetic bloke, Shirley-Ann summed up. You're not enjoying this one bit, so why are you here?

Rupert had been slightly thrown by Sid's observation. "The point I was about to make-I think-is that the sort of thing you people enjoy doesn't deserve to be called a crime novel. The only crime novelists worthy of the name are writers you've probably never heard of, let alone read. Ellroy, Vachss, Raymond-the ones bold enough to lift stones and show us the teeming activity underneath. Not country houses, but ghettos where young kids carry guns and murder for crack and even younger kids are sodomized. Corrupt cops taking bribes from pimps and beating confessions out of luckless Irish boys. Rape victims infected with AIDS. Squats littered with used syringes and verminous mattresses and roaches feeding on stale vomit."

"I don't have the slightest desire to read about stale vomit," said Miss Chilmark. "You get enough of that on the television."

"Precisely," said Rupert. "You switch channels and watch some sanitized story about a sweet old lady who makes nanas of the police through amateur detective work. The same formula week in, week out."

"As a matter of fact, I hardly ever watch television these days," Miss Chilmark told him loftily. "I don't know why I still keep the set in my drawing room."

Rupert's eyes glittered at the mention of Miss Chilmark's drawing room.

Polly cleared her throat and said, "Did anyone wish to say any more about the classic detective story?"

"Is that what we were discussing?" Milo said with a disdainful look at Rupert. "You could have fooled me. Yes, one of us obviously has to speak up for the story that challenges the reader, and as usual, it's me. I put it to you that the Golden Age writers between the wars brought the art of mystification to perfection. Regardless of what some of you were saying just now, I could name a dozen novels of that time, and probably more, that for the brilliance of their plotting stand comparison with anything written in the last half century. You may talk about the intricacy of a le Carre novel or the punching power of your hard-boiled Americans, but for me and for many others the test is whether the writer has the courage to lay out a mystery-a fair puzzle with clues-and say to the reader, 'Solve this if you can'-and then pull off a series of surprises topped by a stunning revelation at the end."

"But at the cost of many of the other merits one looks for in a decent novel," said Jessica with more restraint than Rupert.

"Such as…?"

"Character, pace, sharp dialogue, and, above all, credibility. The books you're talking about were excellent in their time, Milo, but they were never more than pleasant diversions."

"Pastimes," suggested Shirley-Ann, and got a nod from Jessica.

"That's a word you don't hear so much these days," said Polly abstractedly. "Pastimes. Nice word."

Milo was not to be overridden. "Of course, the most basic and fascinating form of detective puzzle is the locked room mystery."

Rupert groaned and slid down in his chair with his long legs extended.

Milo ignored him. "The master of the locked room mystery was John Dickson Carr. The 'hermetically sealed chamber'- as he called it-was a feature of many of his finest novels. I don't know which of you has read The Hollow Man."

Shirley-Ann gingerly raised a hand. The only other reaction came, surprisingly, from Sid, who gave a nod without removing his gaze from his flat cap.

Milo said, "In that case, I shall definitely bring my copy with me next week. Quite apart from being one of the most entertaining detective stories ever written, The Hollow Man has a famous chapter devoted to locked room mysteries. Dr. Fell, Dickson Carr's sleuth, holds up the action to deliver a lecture on the subject that is a delight from beginning to end. Am I right?" He looked toward Sid, who gave another nod.

"Yes, why not?" Milo went on. "I shall read it to you next week, and I'll warrant that Dr. Fell will make some converts among you, even if I can't."

Rupert confided loudly to Shirley-Ann, "He's hooked on this hogwash, poor fellow. We'll never get him off it. Belongs to the Clue Klux Christie and the Daughters of Dorothy L. and the Stately Holmes Society. Quite mad. They think of themselves as scholars, these people. Believe me, my dear, the only fan club worth joining is the Sherlock Holmes Society of Australia. They meet once a year, get totally plastered, fire guns in the air and sing, 'Happy Birthday, Moriarty, you bastard, happy birthday to you!' "

Shirley-Ann felt some sympathy for Milo. He had been outnumbered even before Rupert's arrival.

Polly nudged the tiller again. The best way to focus the discussion, she said, might be to move on to the part of the evening when members spoke about particular books they had read recently. Miss Chilmark offered to begin, but the resourceful Polly remembered that Milo had somehow missed his turn at the previous meeting, so he went first. His announcement that his chosen text was The Hound of the Baskervilles was received with an enormous, deeply embarrassing yawn. For a moment no one escaped suspicion. Then the dog, Marlowe, lying on his side, yawned again, and there were suppressed giggles.

Undaunted, Milo made a spirited claim that The Hound of the Baskervilles refuted the arguments leveled against the classic detective story. The power of Conan Doyle's setting and the drama of the plot far outweighed the whodunit puzzle, which was revealed long before the final chapters.

Rupert went next, after first admitting that he, too, admired much of Conan Doyle's work, but found The Hound one of the least satisfying examples. He spoke about an Andrew Vachss novel, Blossom, based on a real case about the tracking of a sniper who murdered teenagers for sexual kicks. Vachss, he told the Bloodhounds, was a New York child abuse lawyer who drew on genuine case histories and whose books unashamedly crusaded on behalf of young victims. They were written in anger, with a missionary zeal.

The evening was drawing on, Marlowe had given up yawning and was whimpering intermittently, and Miss Chilmark could be constrained no longer. Milo objected that they had often before been lectured on The Name of the Rose, but Rupert, his face radiant with mischief, pointed out that it was a multilayered book. He gave Marlowe a push, and the dog rolled on his back and went quiet. Miss Chilmark was allowed to continue on the understanding that she would talk about aspects she had not touched on before. To her credit, she had some insights to offer on Eco's use of the monastery library, symbolically and as a device to enhance the mystery. All this did take longer than anyone else's contribution, and as a consequence Shirley-Ann wasn't called upon.

"Care for a drink?" Jessica asked her when the meeting closed. "The Moon and Sixpence is just across the street."

She wasn't used to pubs, and said so. The only thing she knew about the Moon and Sixpence was that there was a plaque on the wall outside stating that it was the address from which the world's first postage stamp had been posted. This piece of philatelic history was open to dispute; there was another notice making a similar claim for the postal museum higher up the street. They were currently exhibiting the famous stamp, on special loan from its owner. Shirley-Ann knew next to nothing about stamp collecting, but she'd been highly amused one Sunday morning at discovering the conflicting statements. Trivia of that kind fascinated her.

Jessica pointed out that it was still raining, so they might as well take shelter in the pub and see if it stopped. "That is, if your partner isn't expecting you, or something."

Shirley-Ann was flattered to be asked. She'd placed Jessica in a more sophisticated league than her own. Obviously this chic creature had never once seen the inside of a charity shop, the source of most of Shirley-Ann's clothes. Jessica, she felt sure, was one of that select breed of women who dressed out of the classiest boutiques-where the sales staff started by showing you to a chair and serving you with coffee in bone china cups. It had emerged during the meeting that Jessica was assertive and resourceful and confident at dealing with men. Shirley-Ann told her that Bert wouldn't be back from the sports center for at least another hour.

So they skirted the front of the church and nipped across Broad Street and through the cobbled passage to the Moon and Sixpence. "Some of the people here are far too hearty for my taste," Jessica confided as they went in. "I prefer the crowd across the street in the Saracen's Head, but there's one drawback."

"What's that?"

"The Saracen's is Rupert's favorite watering hole. He dives straight in there after Bloodhounds. Rupert can be fun, but in small doses, as I imagine-his wives discovered."

"Wives?"

Jessica held up the four fingers and thumb of her right hand.

Trade was. brisk in the bar of the Moon and Sixpence. It took them some time to get served. "You don't know who tt›blame most," said Jessica in a carrying voice. "The blokes piling in like a loose scrum or the barmaids who refuse to catch your eye." Promptly they were served with their halves of lager. Jessica spotted a corner table just vacated by a middle-aged couple.

"I brought Sid here a couple of times," she told Shirley-Ann.

"The quiet man?"

"Yes, silent Sid. He's slightly better at communicating one-to-one. The poor guy's impossibly shy."

Shirley-Ann said, "I noticed Polly is very gentle with him."

"She mothers us all. What a bunch!"

"Why did Sid join if it's such an ordeal?"

"Someone told him he should get out and meet people, or he might easily flip his lid. He reads crime, so he found his way to us. It must have taken incredible guts to come down those stairs the first time."

"What sort of crime?"

"The lot, like you, everything from Wilkie Collins to Kinky Friedman. And he knows what he likes. He's quite an authority on John Dickson Carr, the writer Milo was on about."

"Does he ever say anything about himself?"

Jessica laughed. She had the whitest teeth possible. "Does he ever say anything? I think he might loosen up in thirty years if I worked at it. He does security work, I gather. Not Ml6. Just a glorified night watchman. That's when he gets his reading done, I expect."

"He isn't married?"

"Doubt it. I haven't asked." Jessica took a sip of lager and gave a penetrating look. "You said you aren't?"

"Married?" Shirley-Ann shook her head. "Bert and I live together, and that's enough for the time being."

"How did you meet?"

"I joined a self-defense class he was running."

"And he got through your defense?"

She smiled. "No trouble. How about you?"

A sigh from Jessica. "I'm cash and carried, as they say. Nine years. Barnaby works in ceramics. Well, that's the way he tells it, and it sounds impressive. Actually he makes those miniature houses. You know? About this high. They sell quite well. People will collect anything. They finish up with a whole village on top of the telly." She spoke of her husband without warmth, Shirley-Ann noted. She'd had no difficulty sounding warm over almost everything else she'd mentioned.

"And do you have a job yourself?"

Without conceit Jessica told her, "I manage an art gallery in Northumberland Place. It's called the Walsingham, but really it's mine."

"Gracious. I've passed it hundreds of times."

"Come in next time. I won't sell you anything, honest to God. I might even offer you a sherry."

"You must know a lot about art."

"Just certain things I specialize in."

"Modern?"

"Contemporary. You have to be careful over terms. I don't deal in abstracts, which is most people's idea of modern. I'm a shop window for some talented young artists who can actually manage to produce landscapes without zip-fasteners across the middle, or bits of newspaper pasted onto them."

"Local artists?"

"From all over."

"Do you paint?"

"God, no."

"But you obviously know what's good."

"It's ninety percent bluff, darling." Jessica bent her right hand and inspected her long fingernails. "What did you make of the Bloodhounds, then? A rum lot, aren't we?"

"I enjoyed the discussion," Shirley-Ann answered with tact.

"You'll get weary of it. We have that argument about escapism versus realism every week in some form or other. The puzzle versus the police procedural. Country houses versus mean streets. It's never resolved. Never will be. Milo and Rupert are at opposite poles. I'm somewhere between, I suppose, but I refuse to give support to either of them."

"I expect it's amicable."

Jessica dissented by letting out a breath and vibrating her lips at the same time. "I wouldn't count on it. They're capable of murder, both of them."

Shirley-Ann laughed.

"I'm serious."

"You can't be."

She put her hand lightly over Shirley-Ann's. "Darling, if ever I've met a group of potential murderers anywhere, it's the Bloodhounds. It wouldn't take much. They've read about killing, come to terms with it in their minds. I mean, aren't we all participating mentally when we read a crime novel?"

"I'm not sure," said Shirley-Ann. "I've never thought of it like that myself."

"We're the experts, we people who read them steadily. We know all the plots. We've read the gory bits. We know what the police look out for. If anyone could do the job and get away with it, one of us could."

From across the room came a peal of laughter. Someone had reached the punch line of a joke. It seemed well timed. Shirley-Ann looked to see if Jessica was smiling, but her face was serious.